Author: Dan Winther

Typical Dane, single living with a single mother. Open to new ideas and criticism, even abuses sometimes. Lives in sleepy Nordjylland town of Løgstør with a population of around 4000 Danish men and beautiful women consist of old streets with small houses built in the 1800s for fishermen and sailors.

Think you can’t afford to go on vacation? Think again. A Wisconsin-based teacher and author with a passion for Spain, Abbey Algiers looks for inexpensive ways to take trips on her summer holidays. So when she discovered Diverbo, she couldn’t believe it. Diverbo offers free vacations for English speakers willing to spend a week mingling with foreigners in Spain or Germany to help them practice their language skills. “It’s the best-kept secret on the planet,” she says. Algiers spent a week chatting, enjoying Spanish tapas and wine and bonding with…

ICEHOTEL is a hotel built each year with snow and ice in the village of Jukkasjärvi, in northern Sweden, about 17 kilometres (11 mi) from Kiruna. It is the world’s first ice hotel. After its first opening in 1990, the hotel has been built each year from December to April. The hotel, including the chairs and beds, is constructed from snow and ice blocks taken from the nearby Torne River. Artists are invited to create different rooms and decorations made by ice. Besides bedrooms, there is a bar, with glasses made…

Julie Verhage, Bloomberg – May 20, 2016 5:00 am In a note published on Thursday, BofAML analysts led by Shaun Kelley cited a raft of pressures on the lodging sector, such as “soft” corporate demand, a glut of brick-and-mortar hotels, and pressure brought to bear by the Internet, including the rise of home-sharing startup Airbnb Inc. The team is downgrading Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc., Hyatt Hotels Corp., and Hersha Hospitality Trust from “buy” to “neutral” and cutting RLJ Lodging Trust from a “buy” to “underperform.” The analysts estimate that the sector could see shares fall…

Imagine a restaurant where there are no prices on the menu and where the check reads ‘Rupees Zero’ or ‘Free’ with only this footnote: “Your meal was a gift from someone who came before you. To keep the chain of gifts alive, we invite you to pay it forward for those dine after you.” That’s Seva Cafe, a experiment in ‘peer to peer’ generosity. Driven by volunteers and operated by modest staff, the meals are cooked and served with love, and offered to the guest as a genuine gift. To…

Thousands of crickets fans have descended on Christchurch for the opening of the Cricket World Cup, packing out the city’s hotels and motels. Only a handful of rooms are left in a city that “seems to be growing” in anticipation of one of the world’s largest sporting events. There was a “genuine, general feeling of excitement” New Zealand Motel Association (NZMA) chief executive Michael Baines said. NZMA members had room for six people across Christchurch as of 4pm on Wednesday. Moteliers were sharing room information on NZMA’s Duty Motel internet…

In 2005, Yury Shar, Brendon McQueen and Michael Doubinski (all three formerly worked for HotelClub) partnered to create a hotel comparison site where users could access the best rates from a variety of top travel sites all in the same place. Today, HotelsCombined has nearly 200 employees and 17 million users monthly. The site is available in more than 220 countries and in 39 different languages. In 2010, HotelsCombined won TRAVELtech “Website of the Year and was named a finalist in the Telstra 2010 Business Awards. In the same year,…

Obtaining a Schengen visa can be a nightmare at the best of times for the national of countries like India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Thailand and most of the Middle East and African countries. You need to obtain a ton of forms for your application and jump through hoops for the embassy but there is always a nagging feeling that the embassy has not informed you of ALL the Schengen Visa requirements. Yes, believe me they deliberately leave things out and if they have outsourced their visa application processing…

India’s Taj Group has delayed the opening of its flagship hotel in Dubai until the first quarter of next year from this year’s fourth quarter. The launch of the 296-room Taj Dubai, which will be located in Burj Khalifa downtown, is part of Taj’s plans to expand its footprint in the Middle East. Taj Group, which owns the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai, is a unit of the Tata Group conglomerate. Taj Group has 108 hotels in India with an additional 17 international hotels in the Maldives, Malaysia, Australia, the…

Food & Wine

Imagine a restaurant where there are no prices on the menu and where the check reads ‘Rupees Zero’ or ‘Free’ with only this footnote: “Your meal was a gift from someone who came before you. To keep the chain of gifts alive, we invite you to pay it...

Shopping

Thomas Breathnach breaks out his big city Christmas shopping tips for travellers heading to New York, Boston and Chicago this season. by Thomas Breathnach 1. New York Over 100,000 Irish travellers fly Stateside for the annual transatlantic shopping splurge and, unsurprisingly, most of them fill their Christmas...